Posts by doug

1) Message boards : Application Code Discussion : suggestion - "# of cores to use" option, this will speed up Intels Hyperthread cpus.. (Message 40708) Posted 27 Jun 2010 by doug Post: I have an Intel i7 with 4 cpus. It has hyperthreading, which your "benchmarker" is detecting as 8 cpus, and thus it is launching 8 simultaneous tasks, but it really only has 4 cpus. My understanding is that Intel hyperthreading has a few extra storage registers to allow fast context switches, which is somewhat useful in general computing but it really doesn't help at all in compute-intensive applications like BOINC. In fact, it hinders. Doing twice as many tasks as you have CPUs actually will take more than twice as long.... as the overhead of context switches eats into valuable computation time. ------ For an immediate fix, I'd suggest allowing the user to enter the maximum number of cpus to use. I'd be willing to bet the overall throughput will increase! regards Doug Fortune Pentam Aerospace